


Breathe

by rabidbinbadger



Series: Series 11 [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Coda, Episode: s11e10, Episode: s11e10 The Devil in the Details, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 12:06:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5827918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidbinbadger/pseuds/rabidbinbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a storm in Cas, and it’s been building for a long time. Not the storm he’s sometimes described as – all lightning and power and thunder wrapped in flesh. Something else, something slower, more determined. Not the lightning, but the rain that falls for months without cease, wears away at the roof tiles and gets in through cracks in the grout. Drips and seeps into the house until everything inside starts to rot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> [Breathe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmlhCC2VAXo)

_Oh that weight_

_is lifting_

_lifting off me_

_it carries me_

_out to sea_

_and **swallows** me_

 

There’s a storm in Cas, and it’s been building for a long time. Not the storm he’s sometimes described as – all lightning and power and thunder wrapped in flesh. Something else, something slower, more determined. Not the lightning, but the rain that falls for months without cease, wears away at the roof tiles and gets in through cracks in the grout. Drips and seeps into the house until everything inside starts to rot.

He’s been angel and not, there and back. And it’s left damage – well, Naomi called it damage, Hannah would have phrased it in a softer way, but she’d have meant much the same.

Had she been alive, and had they been discussing the lingering hints of humanity threading through Cas’s grace, she’d have pursed her lips and spoken, carefully, thoughtfully, of pouring dye into water.

Something with less of a negative connotation than a wound, or a tear, or a scar in the fabric of Cas’s grace. But still something permanent. Something that’s stained the inner stuff of Cas and can’t be separated from the rest. It’s a nice thought, that this change, this irreversible chemical change that has been wrought on Castiel, is something as innocent as adding colour to clear.

He’s not sure that’s right, though. He’s not sure it’s as harmless, but peculiar, as Hannah would have framed it, once, before—

Anyway, whichever version of the truth is closer to being right, it doesn’t matter. There’s one thing for certain, and that is that it’s there for good now. Enough methods have been tried to alter it – remove it or fix it or however you want to phrase it. Naomi tried to amputate it, and when that failed, she tried to bleach him clean. Razed earth policy – doesn’t matter how much of Cas dies along with it, so long as it’s gone.

That didn’t work out too well for either of them. Cas was left with some deeply buried wounds, and Naomi was left dead.

Hannah’s attempts to accommodate it didn’t fare too well, either. She looked at Cas and realised that he was changed, but she didn’t quite understand how much. She saw Cas as fixated on a muddy little tributary, and thought that all she needed to do was nudge his attention back to the river, and that would be that.

So she showed him angels who needed his help, she showed him duty and purpose and the Host, and all that an angel should desire, if they should desire anything at all.

She did what she thought was best, for Cas and for heaven, but she misunderstood. She looked at Cas from an angel’s perspective. But he wasn’t one anymore. He was half this and half that. An eye to heaven and an eye to earth.

Angel enough to need purpose, but human enough to need more than that to sustain him.

All of which has led him here.

He’s curled up in the corner of Lucifer’s cage, aching and burning all over. He’s tired, and riven with self-doubt and hate, and he can’t stop Ambriel’s description from ringing in his ears.

Expendable.

He once told Dean he wasn’t a hammer, but he’s starting to see that’s exactly what he is. A tool to get the job done and then get set neatly aside until the next tragedy. He’s been tired, and lonely, and scared. He’s been thrown out and brought back, and it hasn’t mattered, because he’s Castiel. He’s an angel, a soldier, and he doesn’t need fond words and praise and gentle moments between violence.

He doesn’t need Dean to apologise for beating him half to death under the Mark’s thrall; he doesn’t need someone to talk with him about the aftereffects of Rowena’s spell. He doesn’t need anyone to recognise that the idea of leaving the bunker terrifies him, that all the things that have been done to him are starting to have an impact. That the trauma he’s felt is maybe, maybe too much to bear on his own.

He’s an angel, and he shouldn’t need the same things a human does. He should be content with the pride of completing his duty, the honour of doing what is right.

But he’s not. He can’t just do things and be satisfied with the knowledge that he’s fulfilled a purpose. He needs what Sam and Dean don’t seem to have time to give him, lurching as they all are from one crisis to the next. He needs reassurance and validation, the occasional kind word or show of affection. He needs to be reminded that his worth is in himself, and not in the duties he performs.

Instead he gets brief moments, a clap on the back or a nod of approval, and then he gets sent to the Middle East to hunt down texts and doesn’t hear from anyone for days. Sure, he gets a reply when he informs them that he’s back on US soil, but it’s perfunctory. An acknowledgement, a request for information.

 And then nothing, until they need his help.

And he goes, of course he does. He goes in Dean’s stead, to check if Amara is alive – and he’s okay with that, because he’s doing something good, something helpful.

And then, an angel he’s never met tells him they’re alike in their expendability. And he doesn’t know Ambriel, and she doesn’t really know him, but it hurts, more than some random comment should. It sticks around, won’t be chased off no matter how much he tries to argue with it to the contrary.

And then the expendable angel dies, and Amara can’t even be bothered to kill him, regards him as little better than a piece of paper to scratch her warning onto and fling in the direction of Dean Winchester.

And so Cas is here, getting beaten to shit, while Dean crouches by Sam’s side and explains their plan to him. And Cas knows this, and he knows that Dean needs to check if Sam is okay after having been here alone in the cage with Lucifer for so long, but still. With every punch that lands without intervention, a message gets driven a little deeper.

The fight ebbs and flows, but one thing stays common – Cas can’t see anyone watching his back.

 

*

 

Lucifer pulls Dean and Castiel into the cage, intending to use them as bargaining chips against Sam. Look here, I’ve got three punching bags and the two human ones have a record of giving themselves up to save each other. Gonna kill the angel to make sure you know I’m not playing, and then go for Dean’s throat.

Except, what he feels when he transports Castiel makes him pause, re-evaluate his entire strategy. Of all the ways he’d thought he’d escape this cage, of all the plans he’d hatched and examined in excruciating detail, this had never occurred to him – and why would it? It shouldn’t even be possible to stuff himself into a vessel along with another angel. It should burst the body at the seams, even if you could get the dormant human inside to say yes.

Except, this creature standing beside Dean Winchester, this half thing – this mongrel of an angel, is somehow everything Lucifer could have asked for.

Castiel appears to have found a way to take ownership of his vessel, expelled the human and gained full control – and ability to give consent. That’s not all, though, that’s not the best bit. The best bit is that Lucifer can see the mongrel’s grace, see the humanity that has started to grow on it like moss. And he can see just how ill-equipped Castiel is to deal with that.

He’s fallen so far since the last time Lucifer saw him, and in so many ways. Gone the angelic certainty, replaced with doubt and pain and fear. So easy to feed off and twist and manipulate. Lucifer is the father of lies, but that doesn’t just apply to the words he says. This cage is his domain, and he can do pretty much anything he wants in it. On the one hand, he can take Sam on little overt daytrips through his memories, flaunt the fact that it isn’t real.

On the other hand, he can work his way inside Castiel’s head without even being noticed. He can fiddle around with perception, chop and change his memories. Give more weight to the bad ones – memories of blows traded, of arguments had and more insidious things, empty spaces wanting to be filled and left lonely and silent – anything that triggers self-doubt and hatred, anything to make Castiel feel worthless and tired and out of options.

Lucifer doesn’t stop there, of course. That’s a job only half done. He also takes the good things – the conversations and heart to hearts, the laughter and smiles, blankets draped over shoulders and time granted to heal in peace – and he crushes them.

 

*

 

Cas launches himself at Lucifer in defence of Dean, and he isn’t surprised when Dean doesn’t help him back. Cas ends up on the floor, with the devil landing blow after blow – for the sheer vicious joy of it, just to cause pain, when he could finish Cas with a flare of white light and be done with it – and Dean isn’t even looking. He’s crouched next to Sam, for the second time in this fight.

And everything sort of clicks into place for Cas. He’s tired. So godawful fucking tired. Ever since he’s started exercising his free will, it’s come down to choice, and every choice he makes comes with a consequence – usually bad. And for a while that was okay, for a while he could move past that, but he doesn’t think he can anymore. The consequences of his choices are piling up around him and suffocating him, and he can only see one way out.

Maybe it’s time, push the button reset to zero. Because Cas isn’t enough to fix this. Amara made that clear, Sam and Dean have made that clear.

Cas can’t fix this, not by himself. But there’s someone who can, and it won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty, and he probably won’t come out of it alive, but that’s okay.  At the moment, he’s not sure whether he’d mind being consumed with no hope of returning. At the moment that doesn’t sound like a death sentence, that sounds like peace.

And anyway, even if that wasn’t the case, out of the three of them, he’s the obvious choice. The one who’ll be least missed. The one who deserves this.

Call it his penance, his grand sacrifice. His crossroads deal.

 He can’t sell the devil his soul, so he offers him his body instead.

And the devil says yes.  

**Author's Note:**

> Oh that song you're singing  
> Singing into me  
> Over everything  
> I used to be.


End file.
